A blog to share security, networking and cloud related technology information as @vCloudernBeer picked up on his search for his destiny in the cloud. (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chowanthony)

Sunday, November 9, 2014

OpenStack Series: Part 9 – Horizon – a web based UI Service

IntroductionHorizon is the canonical implementation of OpenStack’s Dashboard, which provides a web based user
interface to OpenStack services including Nova, Swift, Keystone, etc.

This project is a bit different from other OpenStack projects in that it has
two very distinct components underneath it: horizon, and
openstack_dashboard.

The horizondirectory holds the generic libraries and components that can
be used in any Django project.

Note: Dashboard is defined inWikipedia as "an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance."

In this post we are going to look mainly the OpenStack Dashboard.

Horizon API Reference
A look a the API can give us a better understanding of the capability of what the OpenStack dashboard can provide. In Juno release OpenStack Dashboard added the following capabilities:

Ability to deploy Apache Hadoop clusters in
seconds, giving users the ability to rapidly scale data sets based on a
set of custom parameters.

Additional improvements include extending the
RBAC system to support OpenStack projects Compute, Networking, and
Orchestration

Below is a list of In-depth documentation for Horizon and its APIs I found in the OpenStack documentation:

OpenStack DashboardThis site has a good description on OpenStack Dashboard - The OpenStack dashboard provides administrators and users a graphical
interface to access, provision and automate cloud-based resources.

Dashboard Capabilities

The dashboard is an extensible web app that allows cloud
administrators and users to control their compute, storage and
networking resources.

As a cloud administrator, the dashboard provides an overall view of
the size and state of your cloud. You can create users and projects,
assign users to projects and set limits on the resources for those
projects.

The dashboard provides users a self-service portal to provision their own resources within the limits set by administrators.